Tony Judt, who died in 2010, directed the Remarque Institute at New York University. He was the author of Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945, Reappraisals: Essays on the Forgotten 20th Century and Ill Fares the Land.

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Bush’s Useful Idiots

Tony Judt on the Strange Death of Liberal America

Why have American liberals acquiesced in President Bush’s catastrophic foreign policy? Why have they so little to say about Iraq, about Lebanon, or about reports of a planned attack on Iran? Why has the administration’s sustained attack on civil liberties and international law aroused so little opposition or anger from those who used to care most about these things? Why, in short, has the liberal intelligentsia of the United States in recent years kept its head safely below the parapet?

It wasn’t always so. On 26 October 1988, the New York Times carried a full-page advertisement for liberalism. Headed ‘A Reaffirmation of Principle’, it openly rebuked Ronald Reagan for deriding ‘the dreaded L-word’ and treating ‘liberals’ and ‘liberalism’ as terms of opprobrium. Liberal principles, the text affirmed, are ‘timeless. Extremists of the right and of the left have long attacked liberalism as their greatest enemy. In our own time liberal democracies have been crushed by such extremists. Against any encouragement of this tendency in our own country, intentional or not, we feel obliged to speak out.’

The advertisement was signed by 63 prominent intellectuals, writers and businessmen: among them Daniel Bell, J.K. Galbraith, Felix Rohatyn, Arthur Schlesinger Jr, Irving Howe and Eudora Welty. These and other signatories – the economist Kenneth Arrow, the poet Robert Penn Warren – were the critical intellectual core, the steady moral centre of American public life. But who, now, would sign such a protest? Liberalism in the United States today is the politics that dares not speak its name. And those who style themselves ‘liberal intellectuals’ are otherwise engaged. As befits the new Gilded Age, in which the pay ratio of an American CEO to that of a skilled worker is 412:1 and a corrupted Congress is awash in lobbies and favours, the place of the liberal intellectual has been largely taken over by an admirable cohort of ‘muck-raking’ investigative journalists – Seymour Hersh, Michael Massing and Mark Danner, writing in the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books.

The collapse of liberal self-confidence in the contemporary US can be variously explained. In part it is a backwash from the lost illusions of the 1960s generation, a retreat from the radical nostrums of youth into the all-consuming business of material accumulation and personal security. The signatories of the New York Times advertisement were born in most cases many years earlier, their political opinions shaped by the 1930s above all. Their commitments were the product of experience and adversity and made of sterner stuff. The disappearance of the liberal centre in American politics is also a direct outcome of the deliquescence of the Democratic Party. In domestic politics liberals once believed in the provision of welfare, good government and social justice. In foreign affairs they had a longstanding commitment to international law, negotiation, and the importance of moral example. Today, a spreading me-first consensus has replaced vigorous public debate in both arenas. And like their political counterparts, the critical intelligentsia once so prominent in American cultural life has fallen silent.

This process was well underway before 11 September 2001, and in domestic affairs at least, Bill Clinton and his calculated policy ‘triangulations’ must carry some responsibility for the evisceration of liberal politics. But since then the moral and intellectual arteries of the American body politic have hardened further. Magazines and newspapers of the traditional liberal centre – the New Yorker, the New Republic, the Washington Post and the New York Times itself – fell over themselves in the hurry to align their editorial stance with that of a Republican president bent on exemplary war. A fearful conformism gripped the mainstream media. And America’s liberal intellectuals found at last a new cause.

Or, rather, an old cause in a new guise. For what distinguishes the worldview of Bush’s liberal supporters from that of his neo-conservative allies is that they don’t look on the ‘War on Terror’, or the war in Iraq, or the war in Lebanon and eventually Iran, as mere serial exercises in the re-establishment of American martial dominance. They see them as skirmishes in a new global confrontation: a Good Fight, reassuringly comparable to their grandparents’ war against Fascism and their Cold War liberal parents’ stance against international Communism. Once again, they assert, things are clear. The world is ideologically divided; and – as before – we must take our stand on the issue of the age. Long nostalgic for the comforting verities of a simpler time, today’s liberal intellectuals have at last discovered a sense of purpose: they are at war with ‘Islamo-fascism’.

Thus Paul Berman, a frequent contributor to Dissent, the New Yorker and other liberal journals, and until now better known as a commentator on American cultural affairs, recycled himself as an expert on Islamic fascism (itself a new term of art), publishing Terror and Liberalism just in time for the Iraq war. Peter Beinart, a former editor of the New Republic, followed in his wake this year with The Good Fight: Why Liberals – and Only Liberals – Can Win the War on Terror and Make America Great Again, where he sketches at some length the resemblance between the War on Terror and the early Cold War.[1] Neither author had previously shown any familiarity with the Middle East, much less with the Wahhabi and Sufi traditions on which they pronounce with such confidence.

But like Christopher Hitchens and other former left-liberal pundits now expert in ‘Islamo-fascism’, Beinart and Berman and their kind really are conversant – and comfortable – with a binary division of the world along ideological lines. In some cases they can even look back to their own youthful Trotskyism when seeking a template and thesaurus for world-historical antagonisms. In order for today’s ‘fight’ (note the recycled Leninist lexicon of conflicts, clashes, struggles and wars) to make political sense, it too must have a single universal enemy whose ideas we can study, theorise and combat; and the new confrontation must be reducible, like its 20th-century predecessor, to a familiar juxtaposition that eliminates exotic complexity and confusion: Democracy v. Totalitarianism, Freedom v. Fascism, Them v. Us.

To be sure, Bush’s liberal supporters have been disappointed by his efforts. Every newspaper I have listed and many others besides have carried editorials criticising Bush’s policy on imprisonment, his use of torture and above all the sheer ineptitude of the president’s war. But here, too, the Cold War offers a revealing analogy. Like Stalin’s Western admirers who, in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations, resented the Soviet dictator not so much for his crimes as for discrediting their Marxism, so intellectual supporters of the Iraq War – among them Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier, David Remnick and other prominent figures in the North American liberal establishment – have focused their regrets not on the catastrophic invasion itself (which they all supported) but on its incompetent execution. They are irritated with Bush for giving ‘preventive war’ a bad name.

In a similar vein, those centrist voices that bayed most insistently for blood in the prelude to the Iraq War – the New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman demanded that France be voted ‘Off the Island’ (i.e. out of the Security Council) for its presumption in opposing America’s drive to war – are today the most confident when asserting their monopoly of insight into world affairs. The same Friedman now sneers at ‘anti-war activists who haven’t thought a whit about the larger struggle we’re in’ (New York Times, 16 August). To be sure, Friedman’s Pulitzer-winning pieties are always road-tested for middlebrow political acceptability. But for just that reason they are a sure guide to the mood of the American intellectual mainstream.

Friedman is seconded by Beinart, who concedes that he ‘didn’t realise’(!) how detrimental American actions would be to ‘the struggle’ but insists even so that anyone who won’t stand up to ‘Global Jihad’ just isn’t a consistent defender of liberal values. Jacob Weisberg, the editor of Slate, writing in the Financial Times, accuses Democratic critics of the Iraq War of failing ‘to take the wider, global battle against Islamic fanaticism seriously’. The only people qualified to speak on this matter, it would seem, are those who got it wrong initially. Such insouciance in spite of – indeed because of – your past misjudgments recalls a remark by the French ex-Stalinist Pierre Courtade to Edgar Morin, a dissenting Communist vindicated by events: ‘You and your kind were wrong to be right; we were right to be wrong.’

It is particularly ironic that the ‘Clinton generation’ of American liberal intellectuals take special pride in their ‘tough-mindedness’, in their success in casting aside the illusions and myths of the old left, for these same ‘tough’ new liberals reproduce some of that old left’s worst characteristics. They may see themselves as having migrated to the opposite shore; but they display precisely the same mixture of dogmatic faith and cultural provincialism, not to mention the exuberant enthusiasm for violent political transformation at other people’s expense, that marked their fellow-travelling predecessors across the Cold War ideological divide. The use value of such persons to ambitious, radical regimes is an old story. Indeed, intellectual camp followers of this kind were first identified by Lenin himself, who coined the term that still describes them best. Today, America’s liberal armchair warriors are the ‘useful idiots’ of the War on Terror.

In fairness, America’s bellicose intellectuals are not alone. In Europe, Adam Michnik, the hero of the Polish intellectual resistance to Communism, has become an outspoken admirer of the embarrassingly Islamophobic Oriana Fallaci; Václav Havel has joined the DC-based Committee on the Present Danger (a recycled Cold War-era organisation dedicated to rooting out Communists, now pledged to fighting ‘the threat posed by global radical Islamist and fascist terrorist movements’); André Glucksmann in Paris contributes agitated essays to Le Figaro (most recently on 8 August) lambasting ‘universal Jihad’, Iranian ‘lust for power’ and radical Islam’s strategy of ‘green subversion’. All three enthusiastically supported the invasion of Iraq.

In the European case this trend is an unfortunate by-product of the intellectual revolution of the 1980s, especially in the former Communist East, when ‘human rights’ displaced conventional political allegiances as the basis for collective action. The gains wrought by this transformation in the rhetoric of oppositional politics were considerable. But a price was paid all the same. A commitment to the abstract universalism of ‘rights’ – and uncompromising ethical stands taken against malign regimes in their name – can lead all too readily to the habit of casting every political choice in binary moral terms. In this light Bush’s War against Terror, Evil and Islamo-fascism appears seductive and even familiar: self-deluding foreigners readily mistake the US president’s myopic rigidity for their own moral rectitude.

But back home, America’s liberal intellectuals are fast becoming a service class, their opinions determined by their allegiance and calibrated to justify a political end. In itself this is hardly a new departure: we are all familiar with intellectuals who speak only on behalf of their country, class, religion, race, gender or sexual orientation, and who shape their opinions according to what they take to be the interest of their affinity of birth or predilection. But the distinctive feature of the liberal intellectual in past times was precisely the striving for universality; not the unworldly or disingenuous denial of sectional interest but the sustained effort to transcend that interest.

It is thus depressing to read some of the better known and more avowedly ‘liberal’ intellectuals in the contemporary USA exploiting their professional credibility to advance a partisan case. Jean Bethke Elshtain and Michael Walzer, two senior figures in the country’s philosophical establishment (she at the University of Chicago Divinity School, he at the Princeton Institute), both wrote portentous essays purporting to demonstrate the justness of necessary wars – she in Just War against Terror: The Burden of American Power in a Violent World, a pre-emptive defence of the Iraq War; he only a few weeks ago in a shameless justification of Israel’s bombardments of Lebanese civilians (‘War Fair’, New Republic, 31 July). In today’s America, neo-conservatives generate brutish policies for which liberals provide the ethical fig-leaf. There really is no other difference between them.

One of the particularly depressing ways in which liberal intellectuals have abdicated personal and ethical responsibility for the actions they now endorse can be seen in their failure to think independently about the Middle East. Not every liberal cheerleader for the Global War against Islamo-fascism, or against Terror, or against Global Jihad, is an unreconstructed supporter of Likud: Christopher Hitchens, for one, is critical of Israel. But the willingness of so many American pundits and commentators and essayists to roll over for Bush’s doctrine of preventive war; to abstain from criticising the disproportionate use of air power on civilian targets in both Iraq and Lebanon; and to stay coyly silent in the face of Condoleezza Rice’s enthusiasm for the bloody ‘birth pangs of a new Middle East’, makes more sense when one recalls their backing for Israel: a country which for fifty years has rested its entire national strategy on preventive wars, disproportionate retaliation, and efforts to redesign the map of the whole Middle East.

Since its inception the state of Israel has fought a number of wars of choice (the only exception was the Yom Kippur War of 1973). To be sure, these have been presented to the world as wars of necessity or self-defence; but Israel’s statesmen and generals have never been under any such illusion. Whether this approach has done Israel much good is debatable (for a clear-headed recent account that describes as a resounding failure his country’s strategy of using wars of choice to ‘redraw’ the map of its neighbourhood, see Scars of War, Wounds of Peace: The Israeli-Arab Tragedy by Shlomo Ben-Ami,[2] a historian and former Israeli foreign minister). But the idea of a super-power behaving in a similar way – responding to terrorist threats or guerrilla incursions by flattening another country just to preserve its own deterrent credibility – is odd in the extreme. It is one thing for the US unconditionally to underwrite Israel’s behaviour (though in neither country’s interest, as some Israeli commentators at least have remarked). But for the US to imitate Israel wholesale, to import that tiny country’s self-destructive, intemperate response to any hostility or opposition and to make it the leitmotif of American foreign policy: that is simply bizarre.

Bush’s Middle Eastern policy now tracks so closely to the Israeli precedent that it is very difficult to see daylight between the two. It is this surreal turn of events that helps explain the confusion and silence of American liberal thinking on the subject (as well, perhaps, as Tony Blair’s syntactically sympathetic me-tooism). Historically, liberals have been unsympathetic to ‘wars of choice’ when undertaken or proposed by their own government. War, in the liberal imagination (and not only the liberal one), is a last resort, not a first option. But the United States now has an Israeli-style foreign policy and America’s liberal intellectuals overwhelmingly support it.

The contradictions to which this can lead are striking. There is, for example, a blatant discrepancy between Bush’s proclaimed desire to bring democracy to the Muslim world and his refusal to intervene when the only working instances of fragile democracy in action in the whole Muslim world – in Palestine and Lebanon – were systematically ignored and then shattered by America’s Israeli ally. This discrepancy, and the bad faith and hypocrisy which it seems to suggest, have become a staple of editorial pages and internet blogs the world over, to America’s lasting discredit. But America’s leading liberal intellectuals have kept silent. To speak would be to choose between the tactical logic of America’s new ‘war of movement’ against Islamic fascism – democracy as the sweetener for American involvement – and the strategic tradition of Israeli statecraft, for which democratic neighbours are no better and most likely worse than authoritarian ones. This is not a choice that most American liberal commentators are even willing to acknowledge, much less make. And so they say nothing.

This blind spot obscures and risks polluting and obliterating every traditional liberal concern and inhibition. How else can one explain the appalling illustration on the cover of the New Republic of 7 August: a lurid depiction of Hizbullah’s Hassan Nasrallah in the style of Der Stürmer crossed with more than a touch of the ‘Dirty Jap’ cartoons of World War Two? How else is one to account for the convoluted, sophistic defence by Leon Wieseltier in the same journal of the killing of Arab children in Qana (‘These are not tender times’)? But the blind spot is not just ethical, it is also political: if American liberals ‘didn’t realise’ why their war in Iraq would have the predictable effect of promoting terrorism, benefiting the Iranian ayatollahs and turning Iraq into Lebanon, then we should not expect them to understand (or care) that Israel’s brutal over-reaction risks turning Lebanon into Iraq.

In Five Germanys I Have Known, Fritz Stern – a coauthor of the 1988 New York Times text defending liberalism – writes of his concern about the condition of the liberal spirit in America today.[3] It is with the extinction of that spirit, he notes, that the death of a republic begins. Stern, a historian and a refugee from Nazi Germany, speaks with authority on this matter. And he is surely correct. We don’t expect right-wingers to care very much about the health of a republic, particularly when they are assiduously engaged in the unilateral promotion of empire. And the ideological left, while occasionally adept at analysing the shortcomings of a liberal republic, is typically not much interested in defending it.

It is the liberals, then, who count. They are, as it might be, the canaries in the sulphurous mineshaft of modern democracy. The alacrity with which many of America’s most prominent liberals have censored themselves in the name of the War on Terror, the enthusiasm with which they have invented ideological and moral cover for war and war crimes and proffered that cover to their political enemies: all this is a bad sign. Liberal intellectuals used to be distinguished precisely by their efforts to think for themselves, rather than in the service of others. Intellectuals should not be smugly theorising endless war, much less confidently promoting and excusing it. They should be engaged in disturbing the peace – their own above all.

Letters

Tony Judt is a courageous critic, prepared to do battle with influential intellectuals in both New York and Washington, fully anticipating the anger he is certain to provoke. Given that, I am reluctant to find fault with his essay on ‘the strange death of liberal America’ – essentially, the intellectual death of the Democratic Party – but there are other things to be said (LRB, 21 September).

It is the wish to achieve a high position in the federal government that has made so many young and not so young people ardent supporters of the Republican Party even when they are not avowedly neo-cons. It is important to recall that Democrats have held the White House for only 12 years since Nixon’s arrival as president in 1969. The inept Jimmy Carter did little to generate liberal enthusiasm among the young, and Bill Clinton, who wasted much of his second term in trying to avoid impeachment, could never be mistaken for a liberal in the Roosevelt or Truman tradition. What is commonly said of Tony Blair – that his has been the best Tory government in decades – can also be said of Clinton, a far better centrist Republican than either Eisenhower or Nixon.

There is no young liberal intellectual who in any way resembles Arthur Schlesinger Jr or the late Kenneth Galbraith, just as there is no Democratic Party contender for the presidency in 2008 who resembles Roosevelt or Truman. Journalists know the price that they are likely to pay if they dare to criticise the president or his aggressively self-righteous and untruthful vice-president. In the new America, with its very rich and its desperately poor, neither excessive wealth nor grinding poverty figures very high on the Democratic Party agenda. Instead, as Judt explains, race, gender and sexual orientation issues give the Democrats the support they need, but are not enough to guarantee their victory in 2008. So there is a move to claim that the Democrats are non-ideological, just good old American pragmatists, faithful to the Stars and Stripes.

Judt asks why the liberal intellectuals have been so silent on Iraq, Lebanon and Iran. He knows the answers, and sometimes comes close to making them explicit. Many Democrats, fearing new attacks following 9/11, subscribed to Bush’s view that Iraq was a clear and present danger, armed with lethal weapons that might at any moment be released. Knowing now that this was false, they are reluctant to admit their error and are confused about what to do next. To argue for an immediate military withdrawal from Iraq is much too hazardous. They dare not tell the truth, that American troops are likely to be in Iraq a decade from now, though almost certainly in somewhat reduced numbers. Judt also knows why the liberal intellectuals are silent on Lebanon. Though he is able to write critically about Israel’s policies in a Jerusalem newspaper, and anticipate criticism, that criticism is nothing like the barrage he experiences in New York whenever he says the same things. As for Iran, America’s liberal intellectuals do not know what to say or recommend. They are aware that Europeans see the Iran issue differently, but dare not suggest that they may have a greater purchase on reality than the president or Condoleezza Rice. They recall the hesitations Europeans had about Bosnia and Serbia in the Clinton years, and are unwilling to believe that this time they may be better informed and more astute.

Judt writes convincingly about Eastern and Central Europe and the support in those countries for the president’s policies in Iraq and elsewhere. In this area, where Judt knows far more than I do, I hesitate to argue the obvious. In Eastern and Central Europe – in Poland and the Baltic states, but also in other former Communist states – the United States is blamed for Yalta and much else. Central European opinions on the Second World War and the postwar settlements are substantially different from those that obtain in the US and the UK, and may well constitute a grave threat to the future viability of both the European Union and Nato.

The hostility to liberal values that Judt describes will not necessarily survive for very long in the 21st century, when economic inequality, climate change and the dangers of terrorism and social upheaval are likely to assume new and more threatening forms. The most significant and powerful indictment of the president and his minions is probably Thomas Ricks’s Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq. Ricks sees George W. Bush as a child of the 1960s; so, interestingly, is Blair. Both will soon go and whether they are eventually succeeded by more able and experienced men (or women) with a sense of history will depend on how the US and the UK and others perceive new threats and opportunities, and how they recognise and remedy the follies of recent years.

Stephen Graubard
Pilton, Cambridgeshire

‘Tough-minded’ liberals were nowhere near as eager to begin war with Iraq as Tony Judt makes out. Many were, and remain, quite anguished about it – any consultation of the New Yorker, the New York Review and the New York Times will tell you that. Michael Ignatieff, Leon Wieseltier and David Remnick, not to mention George Packer and Peter Galbraith, did indeed all support the war, but primarily for humanitarian ends: the removal of a psychopathic and genocidal dictator. Judt’s sly comparison of these commentators’ support for human rights with the Western Marxists’ silence on Stalin in the wake of Khrushchev’s revelations is sheer sophistry. But then Judt seems to have no use for talk of human rights at all, because of its ‘abstract universalism’, as though the notions of freedom of conscience, religion and speech were airy fatuities, and somehow not relevant to those living in despotic regimes. Furthermore, Judt nowhere addresses the fact that a majority of Iraqis approved of the invasion. They did so while harbouring no illusions about American intentions: most believed America was there for the oil. Finally, Judt omits one of the most honourable achievements of American liberalism – its agitation for intervention to halt ethnocide in Darfur. The comparative silence of bien pensant Europe should bring a measure of perspective to Judt’s anger, and a measure of shame too.

Sean Coleman
Dublin

Tony Judt describes Palestine and Lebanon as the only working instances of democracy in the ‘whole Muslim world’. The Republic of Indonesia may be a relatively new democracy, but it is functioning and, unlike citizens of the US, the UK or Australia, Indonesians may directly elect their head of state.

Most American liberal intellectuals surely agree with Tony Judt about the catastrophe that is the Bush foreign policy, and the Bush administration’s ‘sustained attack on civil liberties and international law’ (LRB, 21 September). As a consequence, it seems necessary to say that the charges he levels are, to a considerable degree, misleading, and reflect a deplorable ‘cultural provincialism’ (Judt’s words) that is surprising in so seasoned a critic. To read Judt, one would think that the only liberal intellectuals that matter in the United States – and the only ones he reads – are the handful of journalists who contribute pieces to the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books. The only other so-called or one-time liberals who apparently wield any influence, according to Judt, are the new hawks who write to urge a war against Islamofascism, people like Paul Berman, Michael Ignatieff and Leon Wieseltier.

The truth is that the pages of American journals are filled with attacks on Bush’s foreign policy, and indeed on the entire record of the current administration in Washington. The op-ed pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post regularly contain blistering attacks on Bush and his policies, attacks which do not at all buy into the ‘binary division of the world along ideological lines’ that Judt rightly condemns. To be sure, Thomas Friedman has not given up his hectoring about ‘the larger struggle we’re in’, but the New York Times has done a good deal to rally the liberal intelligentsia with hard-hitting pieces by Frank Rich, Paul Krugman and others. Beyond the newspapers of record, there is a whole other world in the United States that Judt seems either to know nothing about or to ignore.

Why does he not cite the American liberal intellectuals who write for Harper’s, or Daedalus, or my own quarterly, Salmagundi? Why not mention the lengthy pieces contributed to Harper’s in recent months by its just-retired editor, Lewis Lapham? The current issue of Salmagundi, a special number on ‘Jihad, McWorld, Modernity’, contains contributions from liberal intellectuals like Benjamin Barber, Martha Nussbaum, Orlando Patterson, James Miller and Carolyn Forche, not to mention other intellectuals like Breyten Breytenbach, Peter Singer and Tzvetan Todorov. Not one of these people has ‘acquiesced’ in the Bush programme. Not one has agreed to the silence that Judt contends has spread across the American intellectual scene. Not one is other than committed to resisting what Judt calls ‘the unilateral promotion of empire’.

Yes, quite as Judt contends, ‘many of America’s most prominent liberals have censored themselves in the name of the war on terror,’ but many other prominent and not so prominent intellectuals have refused to ‘provide the ethical fig leaf’ for the brutal policies Judt would have us identify and resist. To suggest otherwise is not to get the picture right.

Robert Boyers
Saratoga Springs, New York

Tony Judt names a dozen or so former ‘liberals’ who have seemingly deserted the cause by backing Bush’s war in Iraq. Nearly all of the so-called liberals he cites happen to be mainstream and Jewish, and one can readily infer that many of them put their concern for Israel’s welfare, as they interpreted it, ahead of their liberalism. The greater omission in Judt’s article is the plethora of dissenting opinion in organs that are simply not represented in mainstream media. From blogs to Z-Magazine online, and from Chomsky and Zinn to graduate students throughout the US, there is and has been a great deal of informed dissent. That this dissent is marginalised or utterly unacknowledged is the fault of the corporatised media, which ought really to be the subject of Judt’s interrogation.

Robert Boyers and Harold Jaffe (Letters, 19 October) take issue with my characterisation of the intellectual scene in the US today, pointing out that there are many dissenting voices and much opposition to the Bush administration. They are of course correct and I did not wish to suggest that a blanket of universal conformity had fallen across the land, silencing or muffling every expression of criticism. But Jaffe’s complaint, at least, is beside the point: I am well aware that Noam Chomsky, Howard Zinn and others on the American left continue to write what they have been writing for many years, berating ‘the corporatised media’ for excluding them while offering an interpretation of American politics whose credibility rests on that very exclusion. They were not my subject.

Boyers offers a more interesting objection. I failed to take into account, he notes, the many liberal intellectuals who publish in Harper’s, Daedalus, or the journal Boyers edits, Salmagundi, not to mention commentators like Frank Rich and Paul Krugman in the New York Times. But for these purposes Krugman and Rich, like Seymour Hersh, Michael Massing and Mark Danner, are journalists: investigative journalists. And it was part of my point to suggest that it is just such journalists who have taken up the role and the responsibilities abandoned by mainstream liberal intellectuals. So on this we agree. As to the contributors to Salmagundi and elsewhere: it is a cruel truth that any of the writers I named in my essay can reach more readers in one New York Times Magazine essay, or televised chat-show appearance, than a dozen contributions to Salmagundi (circulation c.5000) can hope to attract in a decade. This is not an evaluation of quality but of visibility. And when we are discussing the influence (such as it is) of the public intellectual, this is what counts.